Its easy to delete all mails from a label/folder or inbox, but sometimes we’d like to save our starred mails and delete all the rest. The search box in gmail comes in handy in such situations. Its really a very powerful tool with various operators to make the search more efficient. The gmail search really gives it an edge over other free email applications.

I have subscribed to one of the yahoo groups and over time it has accumulated over 9000 mails. I quite frequently star the mails which I like. I wanted to delete the rest. To do that I just typed “label:techgroup -is:starred” without quotes in the search bar and clicked on Search. It displayed all the emails from that label which isn’t starred. Notice the hyphen, it means exclude.

Explanation

Its really simple and I doubt anyone would be needing this section.
label:techgroup means we want to display all the mails from label techgroup.
is:starred means we want to display all starred mails form the label.
But the – infront of is:starred negates what it does. It means we want to exclude starred items from the search results. So we get unstarred mails from label techgroup.

After making the search, click on the checkbox beside the ‘Archive’ button to select all the emails on that page. You’ll get another option just above the search result which would say:

All 20 conversations on this page are selected. Select all conversations that match this search

Click on ‘Select all conversations that match this search’. This will select all the matched results. Click on ‘Delete’ and empty the trash if you want.

Read more about the advanced search in gmail.

Cheers!

Linux is awesome and so is the terminal. Things become a lot more easy if you can just type in few commands and get your work done. Downloading youtube video has always been messy with GUI downloaders, browser extensions and web services which claim to give you the download link to that video. Now, you can download it from the terminal using youtube-dl in ubuntu. You can also download and install it in other flavors of linux. The script is written in python.

Install youtube-dl from the official repository in Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install youtube-dl

To download a video execute the following:

youtube-dl <url>

Example screenshot:

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Twitter removed its hotmail/msn contact importer tool last year which was a very useful tool. However, there are few tricks which enables you to do just that. The easiest one is:

Twitter allows you to import gmail contacts.
Gmail allows you to import MSN contacts.

Hence, you can indirectly import MSN contacts in twitter by importing them first on your gmail account.

Step by step instructions:

• Create a new gmail account or use your existing one if you don’t mind having your hotmail/msn/windows live  and gmail contacts all at the same place. I used my existing one. Read the rest of this entry »

We all know about functions and how we can pass arguments to it. But did you know that we can pass variable number of arguments in a function?

Consider a function sum() which adds numbers passed into its arguments. Now we want it to add all the numbers passed onto the arguments. Eg; if we call sum (21, 45) or sum (45, 23, 78, 56, 90) it should add all of them. Even if we pass a 100 arguments, it should execute successfully.

Below is the code for making the function sum() :
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Latest Google PageRank update was on April 3rd 2010, that is 2 days back. I wanted to check out the PR of all my subpages as well. However, I was too lazy to check one by one.  I had 2 solutions for this. Either make a PHP-curl script and put all the links in a loop or find a tool which just did that.

I just googled and found http://pagerank.bthomson.com/

You can check PR for multiple links or all outbound links from a page.

Cheers!

Now, you can type directly in Devangari script on any text field on any website. Thanks to http://code.google.com/p/t13n/

Just drag the link below to your bookmarks bar:
Drag this link to your bookmarks bar

How to use

After a webpage loads, just click on the bookmarklet to enable it. After enabling it, you can type in Devanagari on any text field on that webpage. Just type the words in English and it will be transliterated to Devanagari.

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So, you just want to keep a partition for Windows XP and another partition for all your applications that you install. You can change it in all the installations manually but changing the default location is a much better idea. And there are also some applications which don’t let you change the default path.

XP uses the C:\Program Files directory as the default base directory into which new programs are installed. However, you can change the default installation drive and/ or directory by using a Registry hack.

Run the Registry Editor (regedit)and go to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
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Firefox is getting very popular lately, mainly due to its customizability. I use firefox as my main browser and use all sorts of addons which help me in web-development. These addons make my firefox hungry but I can’t do without them. So, instead I tweaked around some settings in firefox which made it much responsive and faster than before.

To tweak those settings, follow the following steps:

1. Type about:config in your address bar and hit enter.
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My desktop computer was running extremely slow but it wasn’t like this before. Even formatting didn’t help, so I knew for sure that there was a problem with hardware. I was right on that, DMA mode wasn’t being detected by XP.

For your knowledge, DMA (Direct Memory Access) is a mode supported by modern hard-disks/DVD drives for much faster access times to device. To check if your HDD’s working on DMA mode, follow these steps:
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Many a time you will want to edit your registry when you get your windows screwed and it refuses to boot up.
You know what changes should be made in the registry to fix the problem, but you don’t have any way to fix it. I had a similar problem and I used this tool to edit registry:
http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/main.html

This is a non-GUI bootable app. You should be familiar with the command-line and how it works before using it otherwise you may get into deeper problems.

This is another tool which I found while googling:

http://www.pcregedit.com/

I hope this helps all you people who are thinking to reformat your computer because of registry errors.

Peace!